DiRT: Showdown

Racing to the front of our benchmark suite is our racing benchmark, DiRT: Showdown. DiRT: Showdown is based on the latest iteration of Codemasters’ EGO engine, which has continually evolved over the years to add more advanced rendering features. It was one of the first games to implement tessellation, and also one of the first games to implement a DirectCompute based forward-rendering compatible lighting system. At the same time as Codemasters is by far the most prevalent PC racing developers, it’s also a good proxy for some of the other racing games on the market like F1 and GRID.

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Well said, and thanks. I no longer visit Dailytech for the same reasons. I enjoy reading comments, since they can offer other perspectives from like-minded people, but unmoderated is worse than nothing at all. This used to be my favorite tech site, but the comments section here has slowly been pushing me to avoid it most of the time.Reply

The 7790 reminds me of the 4770. Sure, that was on a new process node, but it's a late addition to the line designed to take advantage of tweaks, process improvements, etc.

There may be a lot of transistors in a GCN design but I couldn't help feel that there were power savings to be had. For this reason, I'd hope that their next flagship doesn't exceed the 7970GE's power draw whilst providing a decent performance boost.Reply

For those who want the most power in the smallest package and power drain, look no further then the Radeon 7790. The only disappointment was the heat factor, but more or less the same performance as 7850 at half the power; that's great. Also, I don't mind that AMD went the 6 ghz vram route, because now there is even more reason to get 2 GB which is especially needed if you apply a dozens or hundreds of mods to your games. Also its the 128 bit interface that kept the power low, so despite everyone's cussing AMD made the right choices. I have a GTX 460 which easily uses at least 200 watts. This 7790 is almost twice as fast and uses 2.5 times less power. The pricing is acceptable, if you were to include 2GB by default, then why bother with the 7850; they still want ppl to buy that one.Reply

Hey Anand, can you guys please do a video quality test? I mean I haven't seen any such test on any website for over 3 years. So please, can you do a video quality test in movies and games and please also use low quality video as well, not just top of the line 1080p type videos that would look amazing even on a GeForce 3. Reply